by Leah Eryenyu
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was
the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had
everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct
to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period
was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities
insisted on it being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative
degree of comparison only.” (Dickens, 1859: 1)
In July 2021, I got my second dose of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. And with this act, I became an outlier—one of the few Africans, and even fewer Ugandans, who were fully vaccinated. To date, only 2,47% of Africa’s population is fully vaccinated (Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021) compared to 52,1% in the United States (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021) and 67,3% in Europe (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 2021). In Uganda, at the time of writing, only about 1.5 million people had received at least one dose of the vaccine or both (Ministry of Health Uganda, 2021). In April 2021, when I got my first shot, the vaccine was being prioritised for the elderly, those with co-morbidities, and essential workers, including teachers and the police. However, vaccine uptake was incredibly low at the time, driven, in part, by vaccine hesitancy due to misinformation, lack of information about where to get vaccines, and a health infrastructure and supply chain that privileged Kampala, the capital, at the expense of further-off rural areas where the elderly predominate. This set of circumstances meant that people outside the priority categories, such as myself, were not being turned away.
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